For centuries, people have made pie crust by hand, generally just prior to making a pie. The crust-making process is somewhat difficult, timeconsuming, messy, and very often is a source of frustration for the pie-maker. Pies were once a traditional food item, but because of the inconvenience and the lack of time that people have for making pies, pies have fallen somewhat into disfavor. In today's environment of desire to quickly prepare meals with food products of high quality, there has been a long-felt need for eliminating the crust-making portion of the pie-making procedure. Thus, it would be highly desirable to provide a ready-to-use, high quality pie crust which would simplify the making of pies by eliminating the pie crust making portion of the pie making process.
Currently, prepared pie crusts are available in frozen form and are completely formed and in their own baking pans. However, the quality of such crusts is not very good. Furthermore, they are extremely fragile, require a significant amount of storage space in the household freezer, and are not very convenient for making two-crust pies. Numerous attempts have been made to provide a non-frozen pie crust either in sheeted form or in a ball or stick "add water and mix" form which would be rolled out into the sheet form by the consumer. These pie crusts have to date met limited consumer acceptance primarily because of lack of complete convenience with the ball and stick mix forms and because of poor quality with the sheet form.
In the past, The Pillsbury Company provided an alternative to the above-described ready-to-use pie crusts by having a refrigerated folded pie crust which was in sheeted form and the only steps necessary for use were unpackaging, unfolding, and placing the pie crust in the pie pan. However, this pie crust had some shortcomings, foremost among them, excessive browning during the baking of the product which had been held for an extended shelf life (e.g., 45 days or more). Other major problems included off flavors and cracking upon unfolding the crust. However, market tests indicated that the concept of a folded pie crust would meet with high consumer acceptance if the problems exhibited by the pie crusts could be overcome.
The present invention overcomes the problem of excessive baked browning of a pre-folded pie crust late in shelf life as well as eliminates or reduces the flavor problem and considerably reduces the cracking. Excessive browning of the baked product had not been a problem in the pie crust which was relatively freshly made, for example, less than 35 days, but commercial distribution requires 75 to 90 days of refrigerated shelf life. The described pie crust of this invention does not brown excessively during baking throughout 90 days of refrigerated shelf life and has been shown to be of high quality throughout that shelf life.
By controlling the composition of the formulation as hereinafter described, a pie crust of acceptable quality can be made which exhibits good flakiness, non-greasiness and good browning characteristics after extended shelf life while substantially reducing cracking upon unfolding.